I was curious if any of you brave souls have opened up your HD-DVD player and taken pictures? From what I understand there is a Pentium 4 processor and PC Memory inside? Does anyone know what type of memory? It would be neat if we could replace the RAM and cut back on bootup times, I guess it all depends on the maximum amount of memory the motherboard supports.

I was hoping that there would be an expansion slot or that the memory module wouldn't be the the best one available in that specific frequency. All in all I was just keeping my fingers crossed that there would be a way for us to upgrade our players and minimalize boot-up time.

I would think it would yield you faster response and load times, for one...

Why? Is it swapping data from the USB Disk? I doubt it. This player has to only play one HD-DVD movie at a time, I would even think 1GB or ram is over kill for this task.

I think the bottleneck is the Flash BIOS chip as the USB 2.0 connection is fast. Anyone know the throughput of the chip used?

As for processor used it isn't a "regular" P4 it's based on the P4-M core that is more efficient per clock cycle and generates less heat than a regular P4. Therefore the 2.5Ghz P4-M with single-channel PC2700 will outperform a 2.5 P4 with dual-channel DDR PC3200. Also, the current Core-Dual is based on the P4-M core NOT the P4.

The Flash module is made by M-Systems, a mModule uDoc (Disc on Chip)
It has a USB 2.0 interface and is able to boot Linux (and other OS)
It can read up to 13MB/sec and 7MB/Sec writing.
I am pretty sure this is part of the bottleneck. Any hard disk (SATA or IDE) now read at >50MB/sec.
Obviously, 2 GB of memory will certainly not improve the boot time.

Hmm, the mModule uDoc uses access control and data encryption with PKI. So messing around with the module itself is pretty much useless. I guess the easiest way would be to burn the appropriate code to a CD or by phishing the FTP stream , when upgrading the player from the maintenance menu. Then again, without the original source code, it could be an extremely complex task to rewrite custom code. If the original source code 'leaks' somewhere, then everything is possible. If the code was outsourced from China or India, it could showup sometime. ;)

The Flash module is made by M-Systems, a mModule uDoc (Disc on Chip)
It has a USB 2.0 interface and is able to boot Linux (and other OS)
It can read up to 13MB/sec and 7MB/Sec writing.
I am pretty sure this is part of the bottleneck. Any hard disk (SATA or IDE) now read at >50MB/sec.
Obviously, 2 GB of memory will certainly not improve the boot time. :confused:

It looks like the PCBA has room for another chip. If they used a "dual-channel" set or 2 chips in parallel it would double the throughput to 26MB/s Read and 14MB/s Write that would cut the boot-times in half and also reduce the Upgrade time too.

I think the BIOS/Flash chip "upgrade" would speed-up boot times more than anything else, since some people are making a fuss about it. But then you still have DVD/HD-DVD load-times that are slower than DVD Players. which is related to the HD-DVD drive.

In my conclusion for faster Booting & Loading is upgrading to a faster USB Disk and faster HD-DVD drive is required to get the "full" effect. ;)

The HD-DVD NEC drive takes around 21 seconds for media recognition alone. Only a drive firmware upgrade could help speed-up things.
I think the 2 chips module is able to read at 20MB/sec peak (according to the specs)